Dennis M. Hammes

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For criticism see Criticism of Dennis_M._Hammes

Dennis M. Hammes, born April 8 1945, died December 23 2008, was an American Poet and author of Scrawlmarks, the online poetry manual. He was known mainly as a regular contributor to the Usenet newsgroups alt.arts.poetry.comments and rec.arts.poems.

There's some amazing writing in there. I did learn a lot from watching how he rewrote lines and added new ones, and seeing the improvements before my eyes. He built in some great consonance -- the p's in S2 and t's in S3 -- just read it out loud and watch them pop out. I could go on and on about each line he wrote, but I'll limit it to one example that shows his talent; the rhyme in LL7-8: From every jealous Dick and peeping Tom, it Gushed, the prophet-zealot-preacher vomit. The problem here was to come up with a rhyme for 'vomit'. First, Dennis moved 'vomit' to L8, so it looks like the rhyme we came up with, rather than the word to be rhymed. That's just standard good writing; but look at what Dennis came up to rhyme it with! Because "Tom" works so well there, on so many levels (from "Tom, Dick, and Harry" to the Lady Godiva association), the reader can see that "Tom" has to be the word used there -- that "it" has to be pulled up from the next line, just to make it scan -- and therefore "vomit" has to be the rhyme the poet came up with: a truly inspired rhyme, rather than the word we were looking to fit in. And look what pulling "it" up did for "Gushed"; it becomes the first word, and gets capitalized; the second-most prominent word in the line after "vomit". Dennis was a master craftsman, and one can learn a lot about the craft by reading his poems. -George Dance on the poem Hollywood Slut